20 Dmitri Shostakovich Quotes on Music

Dmitri Shostakovich quotes on music

2. There can be no music without ideology. The old composers, whether they knew it or not, were upholding a political theory. Most of them, of course, were bolstering the rule of the upper classes.

3. What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in 'serious' music.

4. If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.

5. A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.

7. I don't think that either self-deprecation or self-aggrandizement is among the defining qualities of an artist:Beethoven could have been forgiven if his symphonies had gone to his head. Gretchaninoff could also be forgiven if his Dobrinya Nikititch went to his head. But neither one could be forgiven for writing a piece that was amoral, servile, the work of a flunky.

8. Music is a means capable of expressing dark dramatism and pure rapture, suffering and ecstasy, fiery and cold fury, melancholy and wild merriment - and the subtlest nuances and interplay of these feelings which words are powerless to express and which are unattainable in painting and sculpture.

9. Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.

11. You ask if I would have been different without 'Party guidance'? Yes, almost certainly. No doubt the line I was pursuing when I wrote the Fourth Symphony would have been stronger and sharper in my work. I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage.

12. What do you think of Puccini? [ Britten: 'I think his operas are dreadful.' ] No, Ben, you are wrong. He wrote marvellous operas, but dreadful music.

16. The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.

17. Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it, it's multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It is almost always laughter through tears. This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my idea of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.

18. I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,' and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, 'Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.'

21. 'For some reason, people think that music must tell us only about the pinnacles of the human spirit, or at least about highly romantic villains. But there are very few heroes or villains. Most people are average, neither black nor white. They're grey. A dirty shade of grey.'

23. 'I write music, it's performed. After all, my music says it all. It doesn't need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.'

25. 'Every composer should be able to play his own compositions at the piano.'

27. 'Beethoven was a revolutionary. If you read his letters, you will realize how much he wished to arouse the public by his new musical ideas.'

29. Here is music turned deliberately inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of classical opera, or have anything in common with symphonic music or with simple and popular musical language accessible to all...Here we have 'leftist' confusion instead of natural human music. The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, 'formalist' attempt to create originality through cheap clowning. It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.

30. Pornophony.

32. He did not write about this war and that revolution, but about war and revolution in general, the state of mind and emotion, not facts.

33. Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention:All his works are marked by emotional extremes - tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm.